Twenty-two people, including 19 children, were killed by a former student while officers delayed their intervention
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The school board of the Texas city of Uvalde fired Police Chief Pete Arredondo on Wednesday for his botched response to the May 24 shooting at Uvalde Elementary School, which killed 22 people, including 19 children.
Arredondo’s departure culminates in a three-month investigation that has weighed in on the fact that the officers who intervened took nearly an hour and a quarter to shoot the attacker since they entered the school.
The resignation was unanimously voted on by an audience of parents and survivors of that massacre, one of the deadliest to have taken place in American classrooms in its entire history.
Ahead of the vote, the school board held a special meeting at which Arredondo was not present, whose attorney, George Hyde, denounced in a statement that he had received death threats in recent months.
Last month, a special committee of the Texas House of Representatives released a report demonstrating the “appalling mismanagement” of Uvalde’s security forces, with Arredondo failing to assume his duties as the chief responsible for field operations.
Before his dismissal, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District had already suspended him from his position as chief of school police and shortly after he himself resigned his position as a councilor on that Texas city council, a position he had held for only a week. before the shooting took place.
It took the officers 77 minutes from the time they arrived on the scene until they entered the school and shot the attacker, Salvador Rolando Ramos, an 18-year-old who had studied at the center. This delay is in stark contrast to active shooting incident protocol which calls for immediate neutralization of any threat, even if minors are present. The students themselves called the emergency telephone from the school to ask for help.
Arredondo has been working as a police officer for nearly thirty years but has not publicly explained the details of his actions. In an interview with the Texas Tribune, however, he stated that he did not believe he was the commander at the scene.
Source: La Verdad
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